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When Stranger Things Was Real · Ebbs of History

• Jason: Mm. Welcome to The Ebbs of History, the show where we dive into the strangest, wildest, and sometimes downright creepiest stories the past has to offer. From dancing plagues to pirate queens, you'll laugh, you'll gasp, you'll even groan at my impeccable dad jokes. But Most importantly, you'll learn how history is way cooler than your textbook ever told you. We are history-loving hosts, Zoe, Gavin. And I'm Jason. And in every episode, the three of us will take a quick trip through time and see what lessons we can still learn today. This is the Ebbs of History. Welcome back, history lovers. We're so glad you're here with us today. Zoe, Gavin, how are things? Things are good. It was been a it's been a good week. I'm still doing my camp that we talked about previously. Gavin is not, he's at a different one, but he finished, so Yeah, this past week I had a summit camp and that was my last one of the summer. So I went to the beach like as like connected to that camp. Mm-hmm. So I'm all boomed up right now. Yeah. Ugh, it's been horrible. But it was a really fun week. A lot of my friends are at the camp. Yeah. So I just made it even more fun. I know you were exhausted the entire week. Yeah, I was. Yeah. But I'm glad it happened and I'm glad it's over. I did it last year. Mm-hmm. But Well good. Yeah. A quick heads up before we start. Today's episode is about a real government program that tested drugs and psychological pressure on people, often without telling them. We'll keep it age appropriate, but it does include some experiments on people who never agreed to them, and the mysterious death of one scientist. If that's not your cup of tea today, we'll catch you next episode. You know the secret government lab in Stranger Things? The one with the sensory deprivation tank and all the kids with powers? Yep. Well, that lab is made up. But The program that inspired it was completely terrifyingly real and it was called MK Ultra. See, that's scary. Yes. You know? Yeah. Like the fact that that's real. The whole like idea of that in like being with the season one like plot anchor and like even it comes back in four, like it sounds so made up. Like it literally sounds like came from like the writers' minds, but like they had real ideas. They had it based on something real, exactly. I mean they weren't they didn't have kids in a in an underground bunker like in the show, but yeah. Mm-hmm. They were still experimenting on people. Yeah. Alright, picture Hawkins National Laboratory. Fluorescent hallways, locked doors. A little girl in a hospital gown floating in a giant tank of salt water while scientists in lab coats scribble on clipboards. Creepy, right? Mm-hmm. Now here's the twist worthy of the upside down itself. The Duffer brothers, the guys who made Stranger Things, did not invent the lab out of thin air. They borrowed it from history. The real program even had a real name, MK Ultra. And the show points right at it. Eleven's mom in the series, Terry Ives, is written as a test subject in MK Ultra. Fun behind the scenes nugget. The show was originally going to be called Montauk after a different government conspiracy legend. before the Duffers leaned into the real CIA story instead. Meet Me and Montauk. Buckle up because this one's a doozy. Let's set the scene. Early 1950s. World War Two is over, but a new kind of standoff has begun. Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Nobody's shooting at anybody directly, but everybody is terrified of everybody. And American spies have convinced themselves of a genuinely wild idea. That the Soviets, the Chinese, and the North Koreans have figured out how to control human minds. Brainwashing. They looked at American prisoners of war coming home from Korea saying strange things, and they panicked. The thinking was if the other side can flip a switch in someone's brain, then we need that switch too. Or at least we need to know how to turn it off. So on april thirteenth, nineteen fifty three, the director of the CIA, a man named Alan Dulles, approved a top secret program, quote, for the covert use of biological and chemical materials. Translation Well let's find a mind control jug before the bad guys do. They gave it a deliberately meaningless code name so nobody could guess what it was. MK was just the tag for the office running it, and Ultra was no joke, basically a random word. The whole point of the name was that it told you absolutely nothing. Yeah. Now as I was writing this, I wrote that paragraph and I thought, I don't know. MK kinda means mind control. Okay. Yes. Right? But it like throws you off 'cause there's a K not. Like it it wasn't that like hard weird like to make that connection. I guess. They could've made it a little bit harder if they really wanted to. Just a little on the nose. Enter our main character, His name was Sidney Gottlieb, a chemist the CIA put in charge of the day-to-day operations. People inside the agency nicknamed him the Black Sorcerer. Now, when you hear sinister government scientist, you're probably imagining a cold villain in a sharp suit, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'm picturing Papa. Yeah, that's who I'm picturing. No, Gottlieb was not that. Gottlieb had a club foot and a stammer. Lived on a farm in the Virginia Mountains. Woke up before dawn every morning to milk his own goats and was, by all accounts, an enthusiastic square dancer who would drag visiting scientists onto the dance floor. That's like the most like country boy thing. Yeah, there you go. Yep. Like Milk and goats, square dancing. Just like farm life. He just seems like a normal person. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Not a a nefarious chemist for the CIA. Yeah. This guy is designing secret mind control experiments by day and dosy doing at the barn dance by night. History is definitely stranger than fiction sometimes. Stranger things. Gottlieb became obsessed with one drug above all others. LSD. The CIA thought it might be a magic key to unlocking the human mind. How obsessed were they? In the early fifties, Gottlieb arranged for the agency to spend around two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which is two point nine million dollars today, to buy what was reported to be the entire world's supply of LSD, ship it back to the United States. Then he started handing it out to hospitals, clinics, prisons, and universities to see what it did to people. my god. What does the drug LSD do? Are you are you or are you gonna go into that? It's like a hallucinogenic excuse me. Yeah? I'm fashion health class, so it's I think it's acid. They call it acid. Like that's its street name. I guess so. I guess I don't know. And here's where it goes from secret science to truly outrageous. The first test subjects were CI agents themselves. officers would secretly slip LSD into a co worker's morning coffee just to watch what happened. Imagine showing up to your spy job and never being totally sure if your boss had dosed your drink a as a Tuesday. The the original drink spiker, like The whole thing had what one official basically admitted was a wild party like atmosphere with almost no rules. The most notorious chapter has a name so over the top I can barely say it on a kid's show. So I will give you the polite version. Operation Midnight Climax. The CIA set up secret apartments called safe houses in San Francisco and New York. They would lure unsuspecting people inside, secretly give them LSD, and then watch them through a two way mirror to study how the drug affected their behavior. All without those people having the faintest idea that they were part of a government experiment. The agent running it, George White, enjoyed his observation post a little too much. He installed a mini fridge stocked with martinis and a portable toilet behind that mirror so that he would never have to leave and miss a single moment. Ugh. He later wrote a letter describing the job with the phrase, It was fun, fun, fun. Ugh. Like, that's just Yeah. Psychopathic behavior. Now I've been keeping it light, but I have to be honest with you about the dark part. Because that is the deal we make on this show. This program was not just goofy spies and martinis. MK Ultra often targeted the people who could least fight back. Prisoners were dosed, including a man who would later become a famous Boston mobster, James Whitey Bolger, who wrote that he and other inmates experienced living nightmares and thought that they were going insane. Like Scarecrow. Yeah, very much so. Yeah, no, exactly. I I bet you there's some connection there. That's another thing that I should have said in How is Our Week? We watched The Dark Knight. yeah. Yeah, such a good movie. Such a good movie. So like god, it was so amazing. Patients in hospitals were experimented on. In Montreal, a psychiatrist funded by the program kept patients in a drugged sleep for weeks at a time while playing them looping recorded messages, an idea he called psychic driving, trying to erase and rewrite their minds. None of these people truly understood what was being done to them, and many were harmed for the rest of their lives. Ugh. See imagine if they told but then they just gave a placebo. I w like I would want to see that experiment, you know? Well, that's how scientific experiments actually work. Yeah. You know? That you're describing what it is supposed to happen. Mm-hmm. So y you have a drug You tell the people what the drug's supposed to do, you give half of them a p placebo and the other half the real drug. Yeah. They don't know what they have. Yeah. And that's how you find out how things actually work. Mm-hmm. And then there is the mystery that cracked the whole thing open. In nineteen fifty-three, an army scientist named Frank Olsen was secretly given LSD by Gottlieb's team at a work retreat, without his knowledge. Nine days later, Olsen died after going out the window of a thirteenth floor hotel room in New York in the middle of the night. For decades, the official story called it an accident or worse. But Olsen's family never believed it. When his son had the body examined again in 1994, a forensic expert found a head injury that did not seem to match a simple fall and called the evidence starkly suggestive of homicide. A homicide investigation was opened, but never produced charges. To this day nobody can prove exactly what happened in that room, and the Olsen family is convinced their father was silenced because he knew too much. Hm. Meanwhile, remember the goat milking square dancer? yeah. Gottlieb had a second job that was somehow even more like a comic book plot. He was the CIA's poison maker, in charge of invented gadgets to take out enemy leaders. His greatest hits include a poison tipped pin hidden inside a hollow silver dollar. A real spy carried one of those. Exploding seashells, a wetsuit laced with toxins, and for Cuba's leader Fidel Castro, a buffet of bizarre plots. god. Poison cigars, a spray to fill his radio studio with LSD before a live speech, and a powder meant to be sprinkled in his boots to make his famous beard fall out. On the theory that a beardless Castro would lose his power. Didn't we just talk about that the other day? Yeah. About the beardless Castro. What were we doing? Pro we I think we were watching a I think it was one of those like f crazy history facts videos and it brought it up but it that was one of the things. So after twenty years and millions of dollars, what did the CIA actually learn? Drum roll please. Pretty much nothing. Nothing. Yeah. Gotly himself eventually concluded that you simply cannot reliably control a human mind with a drug. The Manchurian candidate dream was a bust. There was no switch. Do you guys know what a Manchurian candidate is? in China where they would have like POWs, right? And they would like torture them, right? And with I remember learning about this, w was this connected to those like it was basically like eugenics back then where they're trying to like change you. They're trying to brainwash you. A Manchurian candidate is a person who's been secretly brainwashed or controlled, often by an enemy government, like you're talking about. So they'll do something like spy or sabotage or even kill someone without realizing that they're being used. The idea comes from a famous story where someone is turned into a kind of a human remote control agent. They might seem normal, but a hidden trigger word can switch them into doing the mission. It this is very spy movie. Yeah. It there's a movie called The Manchurian Candidate and it's all those You just played Call of Duty Cold War and that like was kinda like the character, right? That's correct. That is one hundred percent right. I don't wanna do any spoilers, but for the game. Well, it was released in twenty nineteen. Okay, yeah. You haven't played it yet, you're probably not. and you end up in the end being like a Manchurian candidate with a trigger word and That's crazy. A really good story. I don't usually play Call of Duty, but I wanted to play that one 'cause I heard the story was good. I had no idea. Yeah how good it was. Yeah. It was awesome. Yeah, I've like heard like all these like tropes, you know, like the trigger word. I like yeah like Zoe the other day was just like like it's like a funny trend to like making my friend scared of the word like apple. yeah. yeah crazy kinda in like the same vein, you know? Absolutely, right? Yeah. You're conditioning them. Yeah, yeah. It's very different and just like to the extreme. Yeah. Like two very different extremes but like ones for government control. Yeah. But it's still kinda like the same idea. It is, absolutely. Just on a different level for sure. Yeah. But the MK Ultra program left two enormous accidental legacies. First, by spreading LSD to college campuses, MKUltra helped kick off the very thing it was afraid of. A Stanford student named Ken Keesy volunteered for one of these LSD studies, loved it, and went on to throw legendary parties called Acid Tests, featuring a then unknown band called The Grateful Dead. The CIA trying to win the Cold War basically became the unwitting sponsor of the 1960s hippie movement. The irony is so thick that you could spread it on toast. Second, the CIA tried to make MK Ultra disappear. In 73, fearing the program would be discovered, the CIA director ordered nearly all the records shredded. And it almost worked. But here's the detail that makes history nerd like me grin. a single box of files survived. Because some clerk years earlier had mistakenly filed it with the boring budget and financial paperwork instead of the project paperwork. The Shredders missed it. That stray box of receipts plus the Frank Olsen mystery is a huge part of how investigators later in nineteen seventy five and nineteen seventy seven pieced the story back together. A government tried to erase itself and got foiled by its own filing error. my god. Which brings us back to Hawkins. When Eleven climbs into that tank, when shadowy men in suits experiment on a child to weaponize her mind against the Soviets, the show is not just making up a spooky story. It's holding up a fun house mirror to something that genuinely happened. The upside down is fiction the lab is not. Histography Time to put the legend on the witness stand. A lot about MK Ultra is rock solid. The program existed from 53. Sydney Gottlieb ran it. The CIA bought enormous quantities of LSD. Operation Midnight Climax dosed unwitting people, and Congress confirmed it all in nineteen seventy-five and nineteen seventy-seven, using surviving documents. Those facts are not in dispute. The hard part is everything that the Shredder destroyed in nineteen seventy-three. Because most records are gone, we do not know how many people were experimented on, who they all were, or whether anyone was ever successfully quote unquote controlled. That missing evidence is exactly where the rumor rushes in. You will hear sweeping claims online that MK Ultra was cre creating assassins or explains every modern conspiracy. Be careful there. The well-documented program was disturbing enough on its own. Frank Olson's death is the honest middle ground. A forensic expert called it a suggestive of homicide. But suggestive is not proven, and the case remains officially unsolved. Lessons we've learned today. Any of the don't don't take drugs. Don't take drugs. 'Cause I'm just I don't know if that's the lesson of this this episode. I know, but it's a win. Trust no one. Everyone's an enemy. No. that's a joke. Don't yeah, d just don't take drugs. I I guess it's Like the government was telling you it was okay. Yeah, I guess if we just don't trust everyone. This is like like still trust It's just like question, you know? You gotta question then, question everything. Like not everything, it's just like d these people didn't know, I just I don't know how I say it. What about The fact that what caused this program to be created? what was behind the Paranoia. Paranoia, exactly. What can you learn from the paranoia that was that made this program? Can you learn anything there? it kind of reminds me of like not bandwagoning, but like just mass hysteria and like just doing anything to keep almost a sense of normalcy, but like not a sense of normalcy, just No, the unknown. I can I say something but like kinda connected to that. When people when there's like high stress in the world or just like personally, people just don't look at things face value, you know? That's a very good point. They they look at something deeper when they really shouldn't and like it's just unneeded. Yeah, so the stress I guess you could say stress makes people do reckless things. Yeah, that's a good way of put it. Yeah, not look into something or just you know, say, okay, government you do, you know yeah. What you're supposed to 'cause you're you're looking out for us, but are they? Yeah. I mean they were experimenting on Innocent people. Innocent people without their consent. Yeah. You know? The missing word in this entire episode, this is the lesson that I learned, is consent. Yes. The deepest wrong was not the strange experiments. it was doing them to people who never agreed and could not say no. That idea that nobody should be experimented on without understanding and choosing it is now a bedrock rule in science. Mm-hmm. truth is sneaky. A whole program was shredded, yet one misfiled box and one grieving family were enough to drag it back into the light. Yeah. Cover-ups are rarely as airtight as the people running them hope they will be. Yeah. And now there's an entire series, like a show, that's one of the most popular shows ever. Yeah. Based on that concept. Based on that concept. Based on that. There's been other things too. There's been other movies and shows and like It was the Men Who Stare at Goats had a little bit of a MK Ultra flavor to it. But it's just like Stranger Things is like the most popular example, you know? very much so. Yeah. In in current the current zeitgeist as they call it. Yeah. That's a good we word to use. Time for the Fun Fact Challenge! Know the rules. Best of three. I don't have to finish. That's my least favorite rule now. On April thirteenth, nineteen fifty three, the director of the CIA approved a top secret program that was called MK Ultra. What was his name? Locked in. I feel like you guys were tied, but Zoe was louder. So I heard her first. What? But I'm gonna give Gavin. It was Alan G. His last name started with a G. That is incorrect, sir. Zoe. Alan Dulles. Alan Dulles. Who the airport in Washington DC is named after. Dulles International. Sydney Gottlieb, the head of MK Ultra was fond of what activity? Bobton. That's Zoe. Line dancing. incorrect. What? What? Watching the patients. No. The what? He was a farm guy. He was a farm guy too. Milking his goats? He didn't line dance. He square danced. Does he do square danced. Nobody got that right. What? Mm-hmm. He wa he was a square dancer. He had he took sci he made scientists go with him to go square dancing. As next step, line dancing and square dancing. I guess they are different things. Activity. Alright, question three. It's always still up one nothing. You got a chance to tie it up here. We can go into overtime. One of Gottlieb's most famous weapons that he creates was a poison tipped pin placed inside a book. A silver dollar. Good job. Tie it up one one. we need to do a closest to the pin here. What does LSD stand for? Lysergic acid diathylamide. Chemicals. Yeah. It's that is a name straight from organic chemistry that I don't want to go back to. Is LSD a hard drug? Yes. Closest to the year. You just gotta give me the year. You don't have to lock in, you just give me your answers. And what year did the shredding of vials happen? Can I go nineteen seventy-five. Nineteen seventy-four. Gavin's closer. Nineteen seventy-three. I won! my god! The come from behind win. my god, I can't believe I just did that. That was crazy. Wow. This day in history. Today is July 30th. And on this date in sixteen nineteen, the House of Burgesses convened in Jamestown, Virginia, becoming the first elected lawmaking assembly in colonial America. Twenty two representatives gathered in a church to settle disputes and write local laws, planting an early seed of representative government in the colonies. Hmm. Sixteen nineteen, that's like super early. Yeah. That's like EHAP year. Like In nineteen thirty two the Summer Olympics opened in Los Angeles. The games introduced the modern athletes' village and the three tier metal podium we still use today. Wow. Where gold, silver, and bronze winners stand at different heights. Hmm. Isn't that weird to think that that wasn't a thing before nineteen thirty two? Yeah. That's kinda crazy. Yeah, it's just it's so ubiquitous and we see it like with everything. Yeah, it's not even just the Olympics anymore. It's yeah, it's such a like a iconic placing symbol. Yeah. Yeah. You know? like vacing. And it's not even a hundred years old. Yeah. That's crazy. And now they're coming back to LA ne next Olympic. Alright, and this last one, I'm thinking about doing a episode on it because I read a book about it and it's just it's a crazy story. in nineteen forty five on this date, the USS Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine just after secretly delivering parts for the first atomic bomb. wow. Hundreds of sailors survived the sinking, but waited days in the open ocean for a rescue that nearly never came. my god. And they were like dealing with sharks and it's it's a crazy story that I think is well suited to our podcast, so I might do it in the future. So, there it is. A goat milking poison maker. Martinis behind a two way mirror. A beard removal plot. and a cover-up undone by a filing error. MK Ultra tried to control the mind, failed completely, and accidentally inspired both the hippie movement and one of TV's spookiest shows. The lab was real, so is the lesson. That's it for this episode. Thanks for traveling your time with us on the Ebbs of History. If you like today's story, share it with a teacher, a friend, or your family on Instagram at Ebbs of History. If you have any show ideas, corrections, or questions, you can contact us at questions at ebbsofistory dot com. signing off, this has been your co-host, Gavin, Zoe, and me, Jason, reminding you that history is not just about the dates and battles, it's about the people, curiosity, and the weird, wonderful choices that shaped our world. Until next time, keep wondering, keep laughing, and keep learning through the ebbs of history.